Apple is 'Doing Something Really Different' for the New Mac Pro

A director, cinematographer, and animator, Baird emailed Tim Cook about the lack of a real update to the Mac Pro over the past few years. Douglas Brooks, a Mac Pro project manager, contacted him about his concerns.

For what it's worth - a couple of months ago I received a call from Douglas Brooks, Apples project manager for the new Mac Pro to address my concerns about the new machine. Obviously he didn't tell me anything about the new MP, but asked me what I wanted to see. I told him expandability for extra graphics cards support, and memory expansion were at the top of my list amongst other things. His reply was simple:

"You are going to be really glad that you waited [to buy a new tower]. We are doing something really different here and I think you're going to be very excited when you see what we've been up to. I can't wait to show this off".

That conversation gave me enough confidence to wait for the new machine. I'm looking forward to the announcement. Hopefully the wait will be worth it.

Lou Borella, the administrator of the 'We Want a New Macpro' Facebook group, recently posted some information from a source about the new Mac Pro, reports MacRumors.

After having been on the phone with Apple myself I now realize the frustration some of these journalists encounter. That being said this post is not a guess or an assumption. I actually have a source or two that has some credibility.

Here is what he was told about the new Mac Pro.- It will be heavily reliant on Thunderbolt.- There will be no internal expandability.- It will have support for Dual GPU's with three monitor support right out of the box.- No FW800 or Optical drive- It will be released in the fall- It will be a completely new design

Some are speculating that we could see an announcement as early as WWDC. We'll find out next Monday.

What I'd like to see is quad Thunderbolt2 (as it is backwards compatible), so support for 4K displays and a dual quad processor workstation level CPU setup with support for 128GB or 256GB of memory.
no optical drive needed, and front panel accessible hardware raided 5 3.5 inch slots and 2 "buried" data 2.5 inch slots for SSD.
Support for one dual width PCIe x16 slot and 1 PCIe x16 or x8 slot. Dual gigabit (or better) networking, and 4 USB 3.0 ...
As no 5.25 drive is involved and with modern components pack it all into a mid-size tower just wider than a 3.5 inch drive.
Allow X-Grid to connect several as slaves.
Bonus points if it can be less than 8.5 inches tall so two sideways can be racked.
Just saying. Apple has the engineering moxie to do it.

Mac Pro will be reversed engineered. Expandability will be from the outside not inside. Yet don't be fooled, all that really means is; you no longer open a door to install physical ram or drives you expand by connecting to the ports externally - the machine is completely exposed, or open to upgrade as you want.